UW Digital Mappa

Please bear with us as we update this page over the next two weeks from DM 1.0 to DM 2.0.

WHAT IS DM@UW?

Digital Mappa (DM for short) is a freely available and open-source online environment for the collection and curation of digital images and texts. The premise of DM is simple and powerful: if you have a collection of digital images and/or texts, you should be able to produce an online resource that links together specific moments on these images and texts together, annotate these moments as much as you want, and make this work public and searchable with no technological fuss or expertise. DM can be used to create your own personal workspace, as a collaborative research space, as a pedagogical space for your students, or as a public publication platform. Once you’ve registered for UW Digital Mappa, the amount to technical expertise you’ll need to have is largely limited to pointing, clicking, copying, pasting and typing. If you can do that, you can create your own digital scholarship, editions and projects in DM.…..

With generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a multiyear UW2020 grant, we have set up a DM 2.0 server here at UW-Madison, and the resource is available for use by UW system faculty, staff and students.

WHO CAN USE DM@UW?

Any student, staff or faculty member at the University of Wisconsin can request to use DM for scholarly research, publication, or use in the classroom. If you’d like to get started, please email the DM team with a rough idea of what you want to do, and they will promptly get back to you: digitalmappa@gmail.com.

HOW CAN I SEE HOW DM WORKS?

Get started by going to Digital Mappa where you can read some basic introduction information about DM and check out some showcase projects (See below). You can also consult the DM Quick Guide for the basics of how to get started. And don’t forget to register for UW Digital Mappa. As soon as your account is approved, you can begin to play around in the environment itself.

HOW CAN I START MY OWN DM PROJECT AT UW?

To get started with DM, take some time to learn about how DM works, and what it can do (above). Explore projects already available (below).

There is also the DM Forum, where discussion threads address a host of questions and issues around DM.

Then, if you think you’ve got a project that might work well in DM, you can email the DM team with a rough idea of what you want to do, and they can set up a meeting with you to talk about your project: digitalmappa@gmail.com.

WHERE CAN I SEE WHAT OTHER DM PROJECTS LOOK LIKE?

To get a sense of what DM can do, here is a growing list of some other DM projects already published or currently in development. Projects with links are available for public viewing.

Note: This DM 1.0 is a beta version of the resource, and works best on Chrome browsers. It also has some issues with touchscreen laptops. We are currently working on DM 2.0 (under development for a release later this year), which will resolve such issues.

Current DM@UW Projects

• Old English Poetry in Facsimile: a resource collating available digital facsimiles and transcriptions of Old English poetry (Martin Foys, English Department)

• George Moses Horton Project: an edition of the newly-discovered manuscript essay by the nineteenth-century enslaved African American poet George Moses Horton (Jonathan Senchyne, iSchool)

• English Manor and Court Records: a digital edition of the 14th-century Wilburton Manorial Records held at UW Memorial Library’s Special Collections (Heather Wacha, iSchool)

• Ezra Pound and the Music of Beowulf: a digital critical edition of an essay of Ezra Pound that blends poetics and medievalism, “The Music of Beowulf,” alongside related archival material. (Maxwell Gray, English Department)

Please Note: DM Projects that have not been authorized to be developed at UW will be routinely scrubbed from the server. Make sure to send an email to digitalmappa@gmail.com to get authorization before starting any work on a project